Occupy as Form: Andrew Weiner

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the working session "Occupy as Form" on February 10, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Andrew Weiner, lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts.


Keyword: Autonomy


Among the numerous memes, tropes, and forms associated with the Occupy movement is that of a concerted, public refusal to make specific demands. Although advocates of this tactic have seen it as a potent way to argue that the existing political system must be overhauled, rather than accomodated, many liberals have criticized such a position as impractical, while conservative pundits tout this apparent irrationality as proof that Occupy can’t be trusted. So how might we understand the singular demands made by the rhetoric of “no demands”? What sort of analysis could enable us to disentangle the many different aesthetic, technical, and political factors that converge in this form of contestation?


I would argue that any attempt to engage these questions should be sensitive to their potential overdetermination. For example, we might consider the refusal to make specific demands as a radical claim to autonomy, an insistence that a space free from domination can be secured through independent action. Such a position combines aspects of multiple modes of thought and practice, not all of which are commensurable. Although it recalls Marx’s model of emancipation as collective self-determination, it also resembles Adorno’s valorization of aesthetic negation, in which the refusal to clearly signify was held to be a crucial form of resistance. While certain Occupy tactics exhibit continuity with precedents in the US –– the civil rights movement, the mobilization against Vietnam, ACT-UP –– others are more clearly influenced by sectors of the European Left, ranging from the independent educational initiatives of the 1970s to the various neo-Marxisms typically grouped together under the term Autonomism.


If the conditions that inform Occupy are thus complex and internally inconsistent, this in no way means that the movement is necessarily doomed to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. Rather, it indicates that it might yet be possible to rearticulate the movement’s heterogenous elements into effective new forms. Such an approach might make it possible to operate in a space outside normative political rationality in a way that doesn’t concede to liberal or conservative critics. In other words, might it not be possible to at once refuse to make demands AND demand that Citizens United be repealed, that the Glass-Steagall Act be reinstated, etc.? And might it not be possible to do so in ways that interlace different forms of autonomy, blending clearly intelligible demands with the more formless shapes of emergent collective possibilities?